The Society of IT Management has said that public sector ICT professionals are being squeezed between a cut in budgets and increased demand for their services.
Its annual report on IT trends shows that the financial resources available to local authorities' IT teams are forecast to fall by 11% in 2009-10, involving cuts of 20% …

Schools Funding - Harnessing Technology

The very substantial (£ 200 million pa, about £ 10k per school pa) Harnessing Tchnology Grant continues for one more year until 2011, assuming the tories don't get in in time to cut it, which looks a bit unlikely. Some of this is spent by local authorities and the remainder diivvied up to schools. Local Authorities will therefore receive a double squeeze in so far as first they will lose a source of direct funds and then they will need to compensate for that by increasing charges to schools, which have themselves lost the earmarked marked funding used up till now to buy those local authority services.

From a competent local authority and there are some, services to schools include serious connectivity, hosting, storage, filtered secure web services, VLE and Content Management Services, data handling, management information and security services. Some local authorities have done little more than dole out the cash and let the schools sort it out. Perhaps because the schools ICT programme is shared by twenty-odd thousand schools, rather than seen as one lump as in the NHS IT spend, Edward Leigh's public accounts committee doesn't seem to have found a Schools ICT scandal. Perhaps there is no nulabour throws billions at IT and has bugger all to show for it scandal in education.

In some places e,g Birmingham, judicious use of the HT grant and its predecessors leaves schools connected to Birmingham's fibre grid at very substantial uncontended bandwidths with at least the physical infrastructure in place to provide low cost solutions for the future. Unfortunately, for reasons of geography, the absence of infrastructure, or lack of political will that has not been the case universally and some schools elsewhere have little better than a domestic copper DSL line and will be faced with some very substantial costs should they require an improvement. It remains to be seen whether the investment in so-called learning platform services has been of value.

I did that too...

Took a job at 24k some years back. expecting (from the description and interview) to be taking on large distributed network administration and development. Turned out they just wanted people to potter about installing word , setting up the odd printer and battle with the appalling bespoke "applications" they had. All on the crappiest PC's I've ever seen.

What a joke. I couldn't live like that, left for better things.

Also, out of a team of 15 there were about three of us that were any good, all getting paid the same.

What comes around goes around

I remember the days back in the early to mid 90s when Public Sector pay was pretty normal. The problem was that no one wanted to go into the Public sector. Salaries were increased to "attract" more candidates, only for the them to be increased too much.

Now that 'most' organisations are squeezing the their budgets, I know that most are also lowering/aligning salaries of contractors to permenant levels. And in turn, lowering those permenant salaries down further - although existing staff will be capped for a certain period of time due to obvious Union negotiations.

I've worked in the Public Sector, and had the fortune of working with some of the best personel I have come across. There are definite differences, but I wouldn't share both of your views of generalise public sector ICT staff.

Personally, Private sector all the way! (Especially with this Gubbermint on the road to ruin [Election] - but will it be any better? doubt it)

Overpaid? Yeah if only!

Budget?

just charge other departments, hello. They want something, they pay for it out of their budget that is how IT works, you take a small budget for a skeleton staff, and everything else is one long negotiation which you also charge for. Simple, you hire consultants to do the work, you don't have an IT empire in the public sector disgraceful. And it is far more fun watching over departments beg rather than expect, need a mercenary killer instinct with it all and a loathing of public services.